When former ESPN President John Skipper resigned in December, shock waves rippled through the sports network.
But this week, The Hollywood Reporter’s James Andrew Miller [revealed](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/john-skipper-details-espn-exit-cocaine-extortion-plot-1094657) that behind that departure was a cocaine extortion plot, just adding to the disbelief.
No one Miller spoke to “saw any kind of indication that he had been using,” the reporter told Cheddar Friday. “There was just widespread shock.”
Even Skipper himself did not know he would resign when he did. That day “he woke up as president of ESPN, fully believing he was going to continue to be president of ESPN,” Miller explained.
But Skipper told him that he was “threatened concerning a purchase of cocaine” by an unidentified person.
After revealing this to Bob Iger, CEO at Disney, which owns ESPN, Skipper resigned, leaving behind a company he had worked at for almost three decades.
During his time as president, Skipper led the company’s aggressive push to secure long-term agreements with sports leagues to cover live events.
But the network has been losing subscribers for years, and its outlook even under Skipper was already murky.
Miller said ESPN is now “straddling two eras.”
“It’s got one foot in this unbelievably successful past, and it’s got another foot in a very, very uncertain future because of cord-cutting and rising programming costs.
“There’s a lot more uncertainties about what ESPN will be like five or ten years from now than there probably ever has been in its history.”
For the full interview, click [here](https://cheddar.com/videos/inside-john-skippers-abrupt-departure-from-espn).
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The battle royale, "last man standing" phenomenon has all but engulfed the video game industry. Though whether you prefer realistic bullet drop, zombies, or even trampolines, the premise still involves cutting down your competition with conventional weaponry like swords and firearms. Spell Break IS one of these games, but what if you'd prefer to incinerate your enemies with a fireball? Or choke them to death with a cloud of poison?
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Respawn Launches Free to Play Battle Royale Game
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Chris 'Hellpockets" Fields reflects on the Red Bull Final Summoning. Hellpockets also weighs on the character changes in Dragon Ball Fighterz.
Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman might be the MVP of the Super Bowl, but the #MVP award for Super Bowl brands goes to Planters' Mr. Peanut. Mr. Peanut won Twitter's #BrandBowl contest for generating the most brand-related tweets during the Big Game. "They ran a really smart sweepstakes on Twitter and were giving things away during the game," Ryan Oliver, Twitter head of brand strategy, told Cheddar on Monday.
Bud Light topped Salesforce's list of most buzzed-about brands during the Super Bowl, followed closely by Pepsi, Budweiser, Doritos, and Avocados from Mexico. Rob Begg, Salesforce's vice president of product marketing, said what set those brands apart was their active engagement on social media. "One of the things we did see with brands over the Super Bowl were the ones who had the highest mentions and the biggest buzz were the ones that sort of carried the advertising conversation online,” he told Cheddar.
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While the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams face off for the Super Bowl title, advertisers will be waging their own battles during Twitter's Brand Bowl 53. Ryan Oliver, senior director of brand strategy for the U.S. and Canada at Twitter ($TWTR), said the Brand Bowl is a celebration of the advertisers that are being talked about on Twitter.
